


Lying In The Bed I Made

by Poemsingreenink



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Crossover, Discussion of Death, M/M, death takes place off screen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-02
Updated: 2015-06-02
Packaged: 2018-04-02 11:35:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4058512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poemsingreenink/pseuds/Poemsingreenink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oliver is fifteen and all his friends are dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lying In The Bed I Made

**Author's Note:**

> This is unbeted. All mistakes are mine. I'm also not 100% certain these time lines match up, but eh...just pretend they do.

His freshman year the Sunnydale High School yearbook club’s photo featured twelve smiling faces. Oliver was in the very back of it with his arms wrapped around Celia Millerton. Celia, whose hobbies involved photography, smoking clove cigarettes and dragging Oliver to subtitled movies had been a warm weight against his side. Oliver’s arms were wrapped around her in a hug that was just as tight, and he was laughing in the photo because she’d tickled him at just the right moment.

Tomas Amaro stood to his left, hands shoved into huge pockets, eyes rimmed with thick black liner. His lips were stretched into a bright smile that no one had needed to tease out of him. Oliver would sometimes flip to that photo and swapped Celia with Tomas. Replace Celia’s ink-stained fingers with Tomas’ nail-polished ones, and Celia’s curving waist for Tomas' straight hips. That daydream never came true.

********

His sophomore year the Sunnydale High School yearbook club’s photo featured one face; Oliver Hampton’s. The names of the eleven missing members were listed on Sunnydale’s _In Memoriam_ page along with everyone else lost that year. Just like every year before it and every year after.

In the photo, Oliver was leaning against the teacher’s desk with his hands resting atop his thighs. He was staring straight into the camera, and the corner of his mouth was quirked up like he’d tried to smile but couldn’t quite muster the energy for a full one. When they'd finished he’d run to the bathroom so quickly there were still spots in his vision from the camera flash.

He thought about that photo every time he went to see the optometrist, and as he pointed to whichever direction the letter E was facing he’d fondly think back to that brief year in his life when he’d possessed a tightly knit found family, a best friend and 20/20 vision.

********

Oliver came back to school after two weeks of funerals, and camped outside the high school library to wait for Buffy Summers.

Her locker was on the other side of the school. She and Oliver shared no classes, clubs or after school activities, and the few times he’d seen her alone on campus she’d gone sprinting off to places unknown before he could muster the courage to approach her. The only place she went with clockwork regularity was the library. So he sat next to the big double doors and waited.

He got a little too comfortable with his head resting against the wall, his arms hugging his backpack to his chest. He’d only closed his eyes for a moment, but grief was an exhausting companion and soon he was asleep. He woke to Buffy gently nudging him with her shoe.

“Are you dead?” she asked. “Please don’t be dead. Sneeze twice if you’re dead and once if you’re not.”

Oliver jumped to his feet, but his legs were full of pins and needles and they gave out underneath him. Buffy caught him on the way down. She threw his arm over her shoulder and pulled him into the library. Oliver’s head could have rested neatly atop hers, and she was so petite it looked as though a thought could break her, but she pulled him along like it was no big deal. He wasn’t surprised. He knew her extent of her strength.

She guided him to one of the library tables, and sat across from him as Oliver massaged the feeling back into his thighs and calves. When he finally looked up to thank her Oliver found she was staring at him, waiting patiently for him to speak. It was the first time in two weeks that someone had looked at him. Not to the side or the floor, not through or past him, but at _him_.

It was terrifying. His instincts begged him to study the table, to look away from her bright blue gaze and maybe write her a nice long letter. He missed Celia and the rest of the yearbook staff so much that he felt the ache in the marrow of his bones. The easy flow of conversation he’d only ever had with that little tribe of people was gone, and he was back to struggling with basic social interactions. Then, for the second time in two weeks, Buffy Summers saved him.

“Did you need something?” she asked. "Giles isn't here right now."

Oliver opened his mouth and shoved as many words as he could manage into the space between them.

“I’m alive because of you. You just showed up, but everyone else on the bus…I know you tried to stop it,” he paused, regrouped and started again. “I saw you fighting those-”

“Teen hoodlums hopped up on PCP?” Buffy offered with a forced smile.

Oliver raised his eyebrows. “I don’t know what they were, but I know they weren’t that.”

Buffy went still, and then she sighed.

“What’s your name?”

“Oliver. Oliver Hampton.”

“I’m sorry Oliver. I don’t know what to say.”

“Are those things dead?” Oliver asked.

“No,” Buffy said. “But they will be.”

“Then say I can help you,” he begged. “Say I can help you kill the things that killed my friends.”

He hadn’t realized his hands were shaking until she took them, and held them between her own.

********

Oliver knew Willow Rosenberg was good with computers. They weren’t friends, all his friends were dead, but he did share a computer class with her. Whether she was any good at magic was still up in the air.

“Grab a candle,” she instructed.

“This will help Buffy?”

A hot streak of embarrassment ran down Oliver’s neck.

“I don’t mean any offense,” he said quickly. “But this is really strange.”

He motioned to the chalk circle they were sitting in, and the dozens of red candles he’d helped Willow light.

Willow frowned. “Buffy didn’t explain?”

“No, she did,” Oliver assured her. “I just didn’t really understand. She said something about being a human battery, and…is that a knife?”

“Oliver,” Willow said. “The demons that killed your friends have two of our friends. They’re big and mean and she needs some extra _umph_. We’re going to give her that.”

“Okay,” Oliver sneezed, the overpowering smell of incense tickling his nose.

“It’s really old,” Willow confessed. “The spell I mean. It’s old and hungry, and not in a cute ‘it’s 2 a.m. and we’re still up so let’s overdose on brownies’ kind of way. It might want more than just energy. It might take something from both of us as payment.”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure what it’ll ask for, but I figured if it wants a blood sacrifice and we’re sitting here without a knife we’ll look pretty silly.”

Oliver blinked. “That sounds like a really bad idea?”

“Oh don’t worry,” she said. “We each get our own knife, and they’ve both been sharpened and sterilized. If I need to draw a little blood you won’t feel a thing. Well, you might feel something. At the very worst a light stinging sensation.”

She put the knife down, and reached for nearest candle. “Do you want to leave? I can do this alone.”

Oliver thought about the date he’d never get to ask Tomas on, Celia’s closed-casket funeral and his lonely yearbook photo. He picked up a candle.

“Tell me what to do.”

********

Magic was like electricity; wild, terrible and bigger than Oliver in every possible way. His teeth chattered, and his focus stretched so far he could feel the edges of it start to shred as it fought to take in the entire library right before it snapped back, narrowing to a point so fine he could only focus on the flickering candle flame. He was being stripped. He was being unmade, and Willow’s chanting voice was the only thing that felt solid and real.

His vision grew fuzzy at the edges, and he saw Willow spit into the colander of wormwood, cayenne pepper, oil, horehound and god knew what else. She moaned in pain, and then her hand shot up and slammed over Oliver's eyes. He screamed, and his vision whited out entirely. When he woke the world was a blurry mess.

********

“Jesus,” Connor blinked owlishly from behind the frames of Oliver’s thick-rimmed glasses. “How blind are you without these?”

Oliver reached his hand out, and waited until Connor handed them back.

“Very cute. Let me guess, you don’t need glasses?”

Connor smirked. “Twenty/twenty vision.”

“You must be very proud of yourself.”

Oliver pushed the glasses back up his nose. He rolled his eyes when Connor patted the sofa cushion next to him invitingly.

“We're still not dating,” he said, even as he shifted closer.

Connor pulled back his arm which had been on its way to circling Oliver’s waist. Instead it jumped behind Connor’s head where he nervously ran his fingers through his hair.

“How long have you needed them?” he asked.

“High school,” Oliver said. “My eyesight took a turn for the worst my sophomore year.”

His parents had been baffled, confused over why he’d insist on an eye test in the first place, and then mystified at his sudden need for glasses. Oliver thought he'd handled it pretty well. A chunk of his clear sight wasn’t such a bad trade for vengeance. He could have been Willow who’d scarified her entire sense of taste.

“Have you tried Lasik?” Connor asked.

Oliver snorted, he wasn’t entirely sure what would happen if modern medicine tried to replace what had been sacrificed to a magic spell, but he never wanted to find out.

“No, my doctor advised against it.”

Connor stayed on his side of the couch, but held Oliver’s gaze.

“My eyes must be a kind of blind love. I can’t see anyone, but you.”

Oliver winced.

“You have a horrible singing voice,” he said with a laugh.

He’d never talked to Buffy again, but in those weeks after the spell she would sometimes catch his attention from across the crowded hallway and smile. Some days the way she insisted on seeing him left him terrified. Other days it was the only thing that kept Oliver from fading away.  

“Connor, stop looking at me!”

Connor leaned closer, and Oliver ducked his head.

“Now why would I ever do a stupid thing like that?” 


End file.
